Mice with toys and friends have better anti-cancer responses
Source: Medscape Blogs Author: Alok Khorana, MD As clinicians, we know that patients with excellent support systems will (in general) do better than patients without. I had personally always thought of this as being secondary to better reporting and oversight - for instance, a patient with a spouse is more likely to be brought in with a fever whereas a patient living by him/herself is more likely to try and ride it out, leading to more dangerous complications. In a fascinating animal model study published in Cell, researchers led by Cao et al at identify even more of a therapeutic benefit for having such an "enriched environment". The authors show this by placing mice with different types of cancers (melanoma, colon cancer) in two different types of environments: one, the usual laboratory housing (5 mice per cage) and the other "enriched" with "groups (18-20 mice per cage) in large cages of 1.5 m x 1.5 m x 1.0 m supplemented with running wheels, tunnels, igloos, huts, retreats, wood toys, a maze, and nesting material". The results all clearly favored having an enriched environment: "In the mice housed in enriched environment for 3 weeks prior to tumor implantation, the mean volume of the tumor was 43% smaller than those in the control housing (p < 0.05). For the 6 week groups, the tumor mass in EE mice was reduced by 77.2% p < 0.001). Notably, all mice in the control groups developed solid tumors, whereas 5% of mice with 3 weeks [...]